China: c-c-changes

This article on unintended consequences of China’s President’s Xi Jinping’s drive to purge the China’s Communist Party of corruption is likely to go unnoticed by most. Which is a shame, because it shows most clearly just how divided CCP is and how many different factions there are.

Some key quotes:
>Chinese leader Xi Jinping in fact says no one is immune from his corruption probes and that he is going after both “tigers” and “flies,” party lingo for officials high and low. Few in China actually believe that Xi is trying to rid China of that evil, however. After all, the Communist Party has become completely infested, and the president appears to be targeting only political adversaries, such as the infamous Zhou Yongkang, the former security czar, using “corruption” as an excuse.

Matter of fact, the purges have gone so far that
> that former leaders Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao are now asking him to slow the effort, in part because he is threatening their extensive patronage networks and also because his investigations could shake the foundations of the party itself.

And that, the last part, is why Xi Jinping could be the biggest game changer in China after Deng Xioaping’s opening up of China and economic reforms that have set China on its current course.

How all this is relevant to cyber security and risk management is left as an exercise to the reader.